Early Blue Note Jazz

By

Nat Hentoff

Updated Oct. 3, 1997 12:01 a.m. ET

When I was a lad, I spent whatever money I earned--selling fruit from a horse-drawn wagon and working in a candy store--on jazz recordings. At a cut-rate music store in Boston's Scollay Square, I could buy three 10-inch Billie Holiday records for a dollar. But there was no discount on an imperial 12-inch jazz disk on the Blue Note label. It cost $1.50. (All these, of course, were 78 rpm recordings. LPs were beyond the horizon.)